1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a karaoke reproducing apparatus which has a recording medium on which karaoke playing sounds of a plurality of music pieces have been recorded and which is used to reproduce the playing sounds of selected one of the plurality of music pieces.
The invention further relates to a recording disc on which information such as characters, figure, and the like have been recorded as an image and to an information reproducing apparatus for reproducing the recording information from such a recording disc.
2. Description of Background Information
Karaoke reproducing apparatuses are generally designed that a music piece selection number (music piece code) which is predetermined for each music piece is input by a key operation when the user selects a desired music piece from a plurality of karaoke music pieces. After the music piece selection number has been input as mentioned above, when the playing order of the desired music piece comes, the karaoke playing sound of the music piece corresponding to the music piece selection number is generated from the karaoke reproducing apparatus.
In conventional karaoke reproducing apparatuses, some apparatuses are devised to display the music piece selection number which has been input by the key operation so as to allow the user to confirm whether or not the key operation by the user has been correctly executed. However, when the key operation is performed by a user who has mistaken the correspondence between the desired music piece and the music piece selection number, the user will not notice such a mistake when seeing only the display of the music piece selection number. This will result that the desired music piece is not actually outputted from the karaoke reproducing apparatus as a playing sound, after the lapse of a long waiting time.
Furthermore, when selecting a music piece, the user cannot select the music piece unless he knows at least a music title name or a singer name of the music piece which he wants to sing.
In some conventional karaoke reproducing apparatuses, external apparatuses such as illuminating apparatus, background video image apparatus, and the like are controlled in correspondence to the karaoke playing sound obtained by playing the recording medium. For instance, in the case of the illuminating apparatus, color and illuminance of the illumination change in accordance with the karaoke playing music piece. In the case of the background video image apparatus, the background video image of the word video image of the playing music piece which is displayed on the display corresponds to the contents of the playing music piece. Such external control information has previously been stored in a memory in the karaoke reproducing apparatus every music piece. When a music piece is selected, the corresponding external control information is read out from the memory, thereby controlling the external apparatus.
In the conventional karaoke reproducing apparatus, however, in the case of controlling the external apparatus in accordance with the karaoke playing in a real-time manner, it is necessary to set the external apparatus into an operative set state before playing every music piece. Due to this, since control set information of the external apparatus of the number as many as the number of music pieces which can be selected must be stored into the memory, there is a problem such that a capacity of the memory and costs increase. When a new karaoke music piece is added, since control set information of the external apparatus of the new music piece must be preliminarily stored into the memory, the troublesome operation is necessary.
On the other hand, in the conventional karaoke reproducing apparatus, the external apparatuses such as illuminating apparatus, background video image apparatus, and the like are controlled in a real-time manner in correspondence to the karaoke playing sound obtained by the playing of the recording medium. In this case, real-time data has been recorded together with the playing sound on the recording medium. When playing, the real-time data is read out from the recording medium together with the playing sound. In accordance with the read-out real-time data, for example, in the case of the illuminating apparatus, the color and illuminance of the illumination change, and in the case of the background video image apparatus, the background video image of the word video image of the playing music piece which is displayed on the display corresponds to the contents of the playing music piece.
In such a conventional karaoke reproducing apparatus which controls the external apparatus in accordance with the karaoke playing in a real-time manner, however, the real-time data must be provided for each external apparatus to be controlled. Namely, as for the real-time data recorded on the recording medium, there is a fixed relationship between the real-time data and the external apparatus which is to be controlled by the data, as in the case of a real-time data that is solely used for controlling the illuminating apparatus. There is no freedom of degree such that an arbitrary external apparatus is connected or the control contents are changed in accordance with the external apparatus which is connected.
In the karaoke system, further, there is known a system in which in addition to the operation such that a karaoke music piece and a voice sound of a singer are synthesized and outputted as an audio sound, a video image corresponding to the atmosphere of the karaoke music piece and the words information of the music piece are displayed, thereby supporting the singer.
In such a karaoke system, recording information is read out from a recording disc such as LD (Laser Disc), CD (Compact Disc), or the like, on which audio signals, video signals, and character signals to form words corresponding to karaoke music pieces have been recorded, the reproduction audio signal, reproduction video image signal, and reproduction character signal are obtained, and a desired signal process is executed to each of those reproduction signals, thereby executing the acoustic generation and the display as mentioned above. For instance, the reproduction audio signal and the voice signal obtained from the singer are synthesized and the synthetic signal is outputted as an audio sound by a speaker. The reproduction character signal and the reproduction video image signal are synthesized and the synthetic signal is displayed on the display synchronously with the acoustic output timing of the reproduction audio signal. With such a construction, the video image and words information are displayed on the display in accordance with the progress of the karaoke music piece.
In this instance, as a method of converting characters to form the words into a data signal as mentioned above, a method of using character font data and a method of recognizing a shape of character as one image character and using the image data which expresses the shape of character by a set of dots of a minimum unit are considered. In the above karaoke system, the latter method using the image data is used in order to reduce the costs of the apparatus.
When the size of character (hereinafter, generically referred to as a character) to be displayed on the display is large, therefore, since the number of dots to form one character also increase, a data amount of the image data signal which is recorded on the recording disc also increases. When the data amount increases as mentioned above, further, it takes a time to read the data from the recording disc, so that there is a problem such that there occurs a case where the synchronization with the above reproduction audio signal cannot be preferably performed.